Beginnings. Endings. Beginnings.

This is the longest time I have gone without blogging for almost two years.

It began as some bizarre experiment in communicating with dear friends in Britain and California while I was living in Washington DC. It seemed a less intrusive way of staying in contact. Mass mails clog up inboxes and insist upon being read, as though what I had to say and was doing was important enough to merit lots and lots of space in people's heads and computers. Blogs on the other hand sit in quiet solitude waiting until such time as someone like you, or a future me, wants to sit down and understand where I, or atleast the me of a particular blog entry is or was. They are also frighteningly and beautifully indulgent. In the Caucasus I couldn't write enough blogs a day. There were too many impressions, so many thoughts skidding round my head wanting some reflective, soothing order, and this blog gave it to me. The shaping and collaborating of words is infinitely calming. The last two months I've let myself indulge in chaos. Partly because a lot of the people I write this blog for have featured heavily in my summer and partly because I have wanted to absorb every sacred partcicle of living and interacting with people without the medium of a computer. I know the computer and writing this blog will be a major feature of the next twenty months and no matter how great technology and how brilliant the friendship through the internet thing is -- it is going to get bloody tiresome. And not even the most staggeringly fabulous and awe-inspiring MSN chat can beat a hug. Even a crap hug.

But tonight is the night before I leave and it is my last night at home.

And maybe that's why I've been forced back to blogging. After a summer of crazy unreflection and chaotic creativity I need to mark the grounded feel of kneeling before my computer in Cardiff with this secular kind of prayer. I need to mark the endings and beginnings infinitely spaced back across this summer and direct my eyes, this blog and you readers to a new adventure. I need to begin the process of being distant. So I can look towards my coming twenty months in Japan. And through setting down words and lines across this page I hope to bring an infinite calm to the bubbling mass of nerves, fears and excitement that I have become as I count down the hours til I board my bus and my flight to Tokyo. My goodbyes have been said, my bags are packed and the challenge of a new language and a new continent are large and looming.

And it feels strange to be here again crouched on the floor of my room for the last time in twenty months. And to be writing again to you all. And all the words I've been longing to write over the last two months seem to have dissapeared before the chasm of tomorrow and where the next year and a half will take me. Perhaps the Edinburgh Festival is best half remembered, like some foggy life altering drug of little sleep, too many plays and a dirty flat full of pencils and some of my favourite people in all the world. Indeed, to write even that about it pulls my mind backwards and is at risk of making me nostalgic for the people that I love and who I have been disentangling myself from in order to leave. It seems to belittle what this summer has meant to me to attempt to summarise how amazing it has been. And how precious the picnics by the rivers, or the bath tub and chocolate, or watching plays, or the walk through suburbia, or the coffees, or the dancing, or the phonecalls, or the hugs or the rehearsals in our simming pool, or the hot chocolates or simply the delight of being in someones physical presence has been. I hope that there are one or two of you who are reading this. Because it's written for you.

And I hope it winds its way, full of affection and the thrill of communication in threads across various oceans to you dear collection of stragglers and friends who read it. Tomorrow I will be on my own from all I know - unbelievably excited to be in Asia - and madly frightened. But oh so ready for the challenge. And in some small way I want you to all be a part of the journey too. And stand next to me as I board that flight. And feel the lurge in your stomach as we land in a place I can only vaguely imagine. Tokyo, Japan. My home for the next few years.